About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

21 August 2013

'Romance' (2005)

[Having said my piece about “David Mamet on Acting & Directing” (16 August), I thought it
would only be fair to post my 2005 report on the Atlantic Theater Company’s world
première of the playwright’s Romance.The
play ran at ATC’s Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea from 1 March to 1 May 2005,
garnering a nomination for the 2005
Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play.Larry Bryggman, one of the featured actors,
was nominated for the Lucille Lortel Award
for Outstanding Lead Actor and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding
Featured Actor in a Play; he also won the Richard Seff Award and the Obie Award
for Performance.]

I
saw Mamet’s Romance,
a “world premiere,” at the Atlantic Theater Company, on 12 February [2005].

To start with, it’s a farce, including some
slapstick moments. And though parts of the play were very funny, they
tended to be isolated instances with no apparent connection to anything
thematic. In fact, I couldn’t determine a point to the play at all; if
Mamet was saying anything, I didn’t see it. The thing is a silly riff on
courtroom dramas—the characters, except one, have no names, only designations:
The Prosecutor, The Defendant, and so on—interwoven with gay romance (I guess
that’s where the title comes from) and the visit to the city by a
Palestinian-Israeli peace delegation.

The
exact nature of the court case is never really clear, but the Defendant is
questioned about a visit to Hawaii he may or may not have made and some
notations in his agenda (diary/datebook). Most of this, the bulk of the
first act, is tedious, if silly, except that the Judge (Larry Bryggman) has hay
fever and has taken some medication that makes him loopy. He interrupts
the proceedings, goes off on tangents, and starts irrelevant conversations—such
as a recurring one about the parade celebrating the arrival of the peace
delegation that has snarled traffic and caused the Judge to be late for
court—as he gets loopier and loopier. (He forgets if he took his pill, so
he keeps taking more.) This is the part that’s often funny—but to no
avail, as far as I could see.The Judge
was very funny, indeed, but his humor wasn’t related to anything else going
on—which was part of the joke: he’d go off on irrelevant side trips, like the
difference between a chiropractor and a chiropodist. (That joke came up
several times. The Judge found it hard to believe that someone would be
paid for feeling people’s feet! Very funny. Not!) I suppose you
could make a funny little monologue out of the Judge’s lines, completely
separate from the play.

The
second scene of the first act is between the Defendant and the Defense Attorney
in a conference room, where we learn that the former is Jewish (he’s the
chiropractor, by the way) and that the latter is Episcopalian. (One joke:
An Episcopalian is a Catholic who drives a Volvo. I don’t get why that’s
funny—even if it were true.) This leads to some derogatory name-calling
(while the Bailiff is standing there, trying to take a lunch order!). The
Defendant demands that his lawyer lie in court for him. (A lawyer who won’t
lie? What’s that about?) This ultimately goes nowhere, except to
initiate the mutual diatribes (which also don’t go anywhere). Suddenly,
the Defendant conceives of an idea to bring peace to the Middle East—if he can
get out of court and get to the peace conference before it disbands. We
don’t really know what his plan is, but his lawyer sees it as a miracle and the
two are back in league.

The
last scene in the act is between the Prosecutor back home and his gay
lover. It’s a domestic tiff, except that Bernard (the only character with
a name) is a swishy young queen—and a domestic type from the same
stereotype I gather, as the guys from the “reality” TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
(I’ve never actually seen that show, but I’ve heard about it enough to make a
stab at the gist.) He’s a sort of transgender Martha Stewart, I
guess. The Prosecutor (Bob Balaban) is a middle-aged conservative type—a
miss-match for Bernard—and they break up.

All
this is a sort of set up for act two. Back in court, the Defense Attorney
is moving to get the trial continued so his client can get to the peace
delegates before they disperse and go home. The Prosecutor objects, of
course, but they don’t really seem to be on the same page. The Judge is
loopier than ever, of course—he’s gotten new medication, but he still can’t
keep track of what he’s taken. In this jumble of a scene, we learn that
the Defendant wants to go to the conference so he can align the spines of the
delegates and, thus, bring them back to bodily harmony, after which they will
declare peace. (How would that
sit with the people back in the Middle East?! All they all need is for
their leaders’ spines to be aligned!) Bernard shows up (in court,
remember—he just walks in) and brings the domestic dispute into the
proceedings. A witness is on the stand—a Doctor—and, for reasons I’ve
forgotten, he gets into a tussle with Bernard and they do slapstick falls all
over the courtroom furniture. (Somewhere along the line, some of the
characters partly stripped; I think the Judge, because of the medications, had
gotten overheated.) I don’t know the point of having done this—it struck
me as gratuitous—but it was well executed and pretty funny as a set
piece. Also in this mélange, everyone starts gratuitous confessions—most
of which are irrelevant to the plot or even the court case (the actual subject
of which we still don’t know); just “secrets” from their lives. (There’s
a whole bit with the Judge announcing that he’s actually Jewish because his
father was Jewish. The Defendant explains to him that unless his mother’s
Jewish, he really isn’t. The Judge is relieved. This bit’s also
supposed to be funny, though I don’t see the humor.) Also, bits of the
back-story come out—including the fact that Bernard had spent a vacation in
Hawaii where he’d had a one-night stand with the Defendant. (Remember the
question that was before the Defendant when the play began?) They had met
in the same place the Prosecutor had met Bernard—at a leather goods counter at
some store where Bernard works. That’s when the Defendant had bought the
agenda that had been in question in act one, and it suddenly explains the
cryptic notations the Prosecutor had asked about and tried to interpret.
(In one instance, there had been a small sketch of a rabbit. Bernard’s
nickname is Bunny! I actually saw this coming as soon as “Bunny” was
introduced at the end of act one.) I never figured out what all this had
to do with the “case”—or the play in general. At the end of the melee, we
hear the sirens that announce the end of the conference as the delegates leave
to go home.

I
realize that mostly what I’ve done is précis the plot here, which isn’t really
a report on the production, but there wasn’t anything remarkable one way or the
other about the acting, directing (by Neil Pepe, the artistic director of the Atlantic
Theater), or design. The performance was fine (especially Bryggman’s
Judge), but Mamet’s text didn’t have anything to say—hence the emphasis on the
story. It was like a college skit—an adolescent take on a Saturday Night Live sketch
(or is that redundant?) which went on way too long. I didn’t find
anything substantial in it—and neither did my friend Diana, who was with
me. (She made a trip to the bathroom after the show and said other
audience members waiting there were saying the same sort of thing.) It
may be a mark of the problem I had with Romance
that in the week or so after I saw it, I had forgotten many of the details
of the performance. (A lesson to write my report sooner after I see the
show.)[I finished this report on 22 February.]

I
wonder if Mamet wrote Romance
specifically so ATC could premiere it, maybe even under pressure from Neil
Pepe. Mamet’s a founder of the theater company, which has done Mamet
plays before, but never a première. If he didn’t have a play he really
wanted to write, he might have just thrown something together to satisfy his
friends, but without much commitment. That’s a pure guess, of course.

The
New York Times
reviewed Romance on 2 March and for
once, Ben Brantley and I agree on the outcome. He found more significance
in the play in terms of Mamet’s oeuvre
than I did, but that’s the only real split between his opinion and mine.[Back in 2005, I didn’t include the review
round-up that’s part of my ROT
performance reports now.]The Times later announced that Romance was opening in
London at the Almeida Theatre in September [2005]. I wondered if the
London producers hadn’t seen the play here.

Now,
here’s a short quiz: Name another play in which a major character is a
chiropractor. (Answer: It’s William Inge’s Come Back, Little
Sheba. “Doc”—Burt Lancaster in the 1952 film—was a
chiropractor. Remember now?)